ng to passing
travelers, two women are digging the earth and filling up the baskets,
while the men are mixing the mud, filling in the oblong wooden trough,
and thus building the wall. At my elbow a man--old and grizzled and
dirty--is turning back roll upon roll of his wadded garments, and
ridding it of as many as he can find of the insects with which it is
infested. A slobbering, boss-eyed cretin chops wood at my side, and when
I rise to try a snap on the women and the children they hide behind the
walls. Thus my time passes away, as I wait for the coolies who sit on a
log in the open road feeding on common basins of dry rice.

After that we had to cross the face of a steep hill. We could, however,
find no road, no pathway even, but could merely see the scratchings of
coolies and ponies already crossed. It was an achievement not unrisky,
but we managed to reach the other side without mishap. My horse, owing
to the stupidity of the man who hung on to his mouth to steady himself,
put his foot in a hole and dragged the fool of a fellow some twenty
yards downwards in the mud. My coolies, themselves in a spot most
dangerous to their own necks, stuck the outside leg deep in the mud to
rest themselves, and set to assiduously in blackguarding the man in
their richest vein, then, extricating themselves, again continued their
journey, satisfied that they had shown the proper front, and saved the
face of the foreigner who could not save it for himself. Then we all
went down through a narrow ravine into a lovely shady glade, all green
and refreshing, with a brook gurgling sweetly at the foot and birds
singing in the foliage. There was something very quaint in this cosy
corner, with the hideous echoes and weird re-echoes of my men's
squealing. Then we went on again from hill to hill, in a ten-inch
footway, broken and washed away, so that in places it was necessary to
hang on to the evergrowing grass to keep one's footing in the slopes.
One needs to have no nerves in China.

Down in the valley were a number of muleteers from Burma, cooking their
rice in copper pans, whilst their ponies, most of them in horrid
condition, and backs rubbed in some places to the extent of twelve
inches square, grazed on the hill-sides. In most places the foot of this
ravine would have been a river; here it was like a park, with pretty
green sward intersected by a narrow path leading down into a lane so
thick with virgin growth as to exclude the sunlight